Trump will need brilliant lawyers to avoid a criminal charge

The more that emerges from the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago the more likely it seems that Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, will face a charge or charges under the 1917 Espionage Act. Incredible though it is to say so. A president being read his rights? Amazing. First of all the FBI would never have got the warrant they needed to raid Trump's residence unless they had serious evidence from unnamed secret witnesses that the former president had removed from the White House a lot of very very highly classified documents. Now we hear that Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, has called for a review of the potential damage of having these documents locked away in a private safe, albeit a former president's private safe. Most worrying of all it seems is the fear that these top secret dcuments might contain enough intelligence pointers to indicate who were the secret sources for the information. In the intelligence business there is nothing more sensitive than the identities of secret informants who are operating in their own countries and passing secrets to the US. If they are operating in a country where exposure of their betryal would lead to their death, the pledge to keep their identity secret is crucial to their survival. These are very brave people whatever their motivation might be for revealing their country's secrets. So if the documents in Trump's safe contained hints of who the sources were, it's no wonder Avril Haines is investigating. Why on earth was Trump keeping them in his safe? What did he plan to do with them? No one yet has given an answer to this. Trump's claim that he had declassified the documents is clearly ridiculous. If there is anything in the documents that hints at the sources they would never be declassified even if a president could himself declassify them which he can't. Which brings me back to the extraordinary possibility that Trump could be charged and even sent to prison!